CapBBeard: I see Fujitsu taking a lot of stick here but I have to say our experience with their gear has certainly been positive.

They've been our principal server vendor for quite some time now and their late model RX300 line have been rock solid stable for us. The team in Christchurch have generally been good for support also.

Worth a look at least.

Do you know what the difference between the SPARC servers and Industry standard servers are? No one at Fujitsu can answer this, very concerning.I then get asked " will it make a difference " , well i wouldnt know as i don't know what the difference is?

CapBBeard: I see Fujitsu taking a lot of stick here but I have to say our experience with their gear has certainly been positive.

They've been our principal server vendor for quite some time now and their late model RX300 line have been rock solid stable for us. The team in Christchurch have generally been good for support also.

Worth a look at least.

Do you know what the difference between the SPARC servers and Industry standard servers are? No one at Fujitsu can answer this, very concerning.I then get asked " will it make a difference " , well i wouldnt know as i don't know what the difference is?

We're not a huge shop and really only deal with the primergy (x86) stuff so I'm not all that up to speed on the SPARC gear sorry. Have you had a chat to any of the technical guys at Fujitsu? They certainly have people there that could answer you, I am surprised you are saying otherwise really.

Boiling it down, isnt it a question of architecture, a bit like the whole Itanium thing? If you're looking at running something like Solaris maybe take a look otherwise I'd stick to x86.

EDIT: Actually reading back through your earlier posts I see you will be running some Windows servers. That being the case SPARC is out of the question as the architecture is not compatible.

Do you know what the difference between the SPARC servers and Industry standard servers are? No one at Fujitsu can answer this, very concerning.I then get asked " will it make a difference " , well i wouldnt know as i don't know what the difference is?

Their SPARC line are, er, well, SPARC servers. I'm probably going to sound like a bit of an ass, but if you don't know what this means, don't touch them - it's a significant architectural difference. Primergy is their x86/x64 line, which is what you would look at if you were, for some reason, going to go with them.

There is a huge difference between Sparc servers and those based x86 architecture. Only Sun (now Oracle) make Sparc servers and they usually run Solaris and have their own virtualisation technology (called Sun containers). I recently was involved in the purchase of 8 Sun T4 servers like this

Sorry, when I say 'shop' I mean it in the 'tech slang' way, ie 'we're a fujitsu shop' .. We dont sell anything, we just use fujitsu gear heavily. Perhaps not the best choice of words, have grown accustomed to it though!

Would rather not give away any specifics but a little bit of background: We're supporting about 250-300 users, we have a Hyper-V cluster consisting of RX300S7s + an Eternus SAN, plus a 5 server remote desktop services farm (more RX300s, S4-7) and a few other physical boxes.

KiwiNZ: Ask yourself, how important is my data and how important is my clients data to them. Then consider what looks better when making business proposals.

Well yes and no. It depends,

If you're running a compute cluster with a hypervisor over the top, then it doesn't matter as much as your storage is separate. Look at Dell, they have a whole cloudedge range of servers which are designed for that space where features are less important. If one were to fail your your VMs are up and running again in minutes.

If you're running stand alone servers without shared storage, then the vendors ability to execute on their warranty and parts replacement are critical, and that's where the brand names do well.

It also makes sense to pick the vendor well as there are obvious pros to having only to deal with one across your organisation. Dell also have their own financing plans, ie, Dell Financial Services if you prefer to lease your hardware , which can make good sense and free up capital for other things.